Friday, May 29, 2009

Globovisión, Venezuela's equivalent of FUX Snooze, has been a news item in itself for the past few weeks, and for all the wrong reasons. Here's one of them:

Video in Spanish, but the pictures speak for themselves. Watch the chick with the blond bob, the little hand-held camera, and the bared teeth. Aggressive, isn't she? Her name is Beatriz Adrián, and she's supposed to be a journalist. But it seems that her real job is that of agent provocateur (or should that be agente provocateuse?) in the ongoing, futile and dirty fight by the ancien régime of Venezuela--now the opposition--to oust a popular, freely and democratically elected president.

So how is she a provoc?

Well, a few months ago, she claimed to have been harrassed by Chavista goons at a bakeshop where she and a friend went to breakfast one day. Turns out, the "Chavista harassers" were nothing of the sort; they were private security men on the job at the shop, and they didn't touch her. But she squeaked, and she squawked, and her "report" made the news on her channel, where everyone rallied around poor, brave, beleaguered Beatriz--at least until Mario Silva dissected the whole story on his VTV show, La Hojilla, and proved it to be more full of holes than a strip of Brussels lace. The defamed men, meanwhile, went to the authorities with their side of the story. (If you click on the link, you'll immediately see what was really at play--the guys she complained about are kind of non-white.)

More recently, Beatriz thought she'd scored a journalistic coup by bribing a National Assembly staffer to hand over some confidential documents. The staffer lost her job; Beatriz, again, got the kind of media exposure she hadn't counted on when the building's security cameras caught the whole shebang. But unlike the luckless lady from the National Assembly, she got to keep her job. After all, Globovisión needed her...

Which brings us to the videos above. Beatriz Adrián, apparently, has gone from phony "victim" of private security to taking the job on herself. When a VTV reporter, Erika Ortega Sanoja, tried to ask some questions of poor deluded old Mario Vargas Llosa, who was in country to make an ass of himself at a "forum" supporting the putschy ancien régime in the name of "freedom and democracy" (and who, incidentally, was NOT "detained" by security at any time--more on this later), Beatriz took exception to Erika's questioning, and repeatedly pushed and shoved her. At one point, witnesses say, she hit Erika on the head with her microphone; the latter ended up seeking first aid at the airport's infirmary, and reported the assault to the civil defence officer on duty. Beatriz Adrián, however, exhibited only rudeness and defiance throughout the encounter. She notably asked NO questions of Vargas Llosa herself, which is a very unjournalistic sort of thing to do. Instead, she kept spinning around, snarling, taking pictures of everyone around her, as if gathering evidence that she had been the victim of aggression--interesting, since the video cameras of more than one channel, including her own, caught her being very much the aggressor. At several points, she launched herself at other journalists present, including a cameraman for the Caracas community channel, Avila TV. (She missed. Kind of a metaphor, don'tcha think?)

By now you might be wondering why all this journalistic own-goaling is happening. Well, Globovisión is slipping closer and closer to the edge of having its licence revoked. As I've noted before, this sort of thing happens all the time in democracies when a broadcaster violates the terms of use for the public airwaves. But in Venezuela it isn't supposed to happen, and certainly not to overtly right-wing channels looking to overthrow a democratically elected government. Especially not if the owners of the channel also happen to own other highly lucrative things--such as, in the case of Globo's Guillermo Zuloaga, two Toyota dealerships recently busted for jacking up the price of the merchandise two- and threefold, thus ripping off the car-buying public. But again, that's grist for another story. Perhaps I'll make the entry about how this sort of price-gouging is emblematic of the "freedom and democracy" that Mario Vargas Llosa came so touchingly to defend, at great risk to the security of his person...from self-appointed guards like Beatriz Adrián.